Scattered is the latest work from Motionhouse. It’s part of the ambitious Swan Dance season, and it explores our relationship with water, and how it surrounds us in different forms throughout our lives. In birth, water ties us to life, and, on a more elemental scale, in ice, floods and tides it can sweep our lives away. “I wanted to make a show about water because I believe it to be the single most important resource issue facing humanity” says Kevin Finnan, the director. “I have tried to make a show in which we become like the water moving in a fluid world.”

The reason his piece works so well is because Finnan has integrated dance, film and music so cleverly that, even in the audience, one feels drawn into what is happening on the stage. Simon Dormon’s set consists simply of a ten-foot backdrop that curves towards us at the bottom, so that it’s like looking at one side of a half-pipe, the arena of skateboarders and of the exciting new Winter Olympics events.

Against this is projected film by award-winning Logela Multimedia. We begin in an Arctic seascape with ice floes floating past. There are surreal moments throughout the work. Two projected chairs float by, and the dancers able to sit in them, supported by the bottom of the curve. We move from here through a series of landscapes, lakes, oceans, the cracked earth of the waterless desert, and so on.

The dancers react continually with the pictures, using the backdrop to slide down a waterfall or take a shower under a giant tap. The choreography is lean, incisive, appropriate to what we are seeing on film, and the work speeds past in a continuous stream of events, highly physical, often near-dangerous. It is fascinating to watch, and though this is hardly a criticism, there is so much going on that it is sometimes hard to know where to look. Probably the best solution is to look straight ahead and let it all wash over you.